Facebook hits one billion users, not counting fake accounts

One billion of the seven billion on planet Earth use Facebook regularly.

Facebook has done the totally thinkable: it now counts 1 billion accounts in its user base, as reported to NBC's Today Thursday. This count presumably doesn't include the substantial population of fake accounts, which constituted about 8.7 percent of users as of early August.

Facebook's growth has been steady for the last couple of years, with 955 million active users in August. Fake and spam accounts had ballooned over the last few months, going from between 42.25 million and 50.7 million in March to 83.09 million in August.

The company began a serious crackdown on Fauxbook accounts last week, evidenced by losses in page "likes" by entities including Shakira and Zynga's Texas Hold'em Poker. Facebook did not comment on the effect the purge had on the percentage makeup of fake accounts, but it apparently didn't slow growth much. If 8.7 percent of fake accounts held steady, there are 95 million impostors on Facebook by now.

To put that billion in perspective, that's the entire estimated population of the world in 1800, or more than the combined current populations of the US, Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan. Less than nine years ago, no one was on Facebook; now, more than one in seven people in the world are.

I don't know... Maybe. But it seems rather odd that the stock is plummeting like a falling comet and lately Face Book seems desperate to try to prove that they are profitable.

Maybe some investors want to stem the bleed out long enough so when they can sell completely out they don't lose their shirt?

Facebook's stock is plummeting because they massively overvalued themselves. They made $3.71 billion and yet valued themselves at $104 billion. Even if you think they're going to grow their business at a phenomenal rate, there is still no way they make themselves worth $104 billion any time soon.

I'm sure that there are still large numbers of fake accounts, and that they've only pruned the obvious ones (in response to advertiser complaints). It isn't in their interest to drive their number of users down; they want the largest possible credible number.

How are they planning on storing all data from so many people in perpetuity (ala. "Timeline")? I'd be interested in seeing how much disk space is used by the average user (probably not that much if compressed--only a few GBs?) A million 2 TB drives for a billion users? I guess that's possible ...

I wonder if that's counting "inferred" accounts that are created when Facebook figures out that someone has a friend who is not on Facebook and needs a place to store their information?

Also, cue the chorus of people going "I would never use Facebook!"

According the the NBC article the number is 1 billion "active monthly users" so I don't think anything is "inferred". I can imagine that some of those billion might be people with multiple active accounts that they use for different purposes though. It's not such a stretch if they truly did have 800 million active users when they did the IPO and even given the conservative growth projections they gave back then the number seems right on track.

How are they planning on storing all data from so many people in perpetuity (ala. "Timeline")? I'd be interested in seeing how much disk space is used by the average user (probably not that much if compressed--only a few GBs?) A million 2 TB drives for a billion users? I guess that's possible ...

Dear lord, I thought I used FB a decent amount...not as much as some of the friends on my list, but I post a lot more than most others. But a few GB per user??? That's a whole lotta meta-data if so.

They can take my fake account from my cold, dead hands. I want to test how their access controls work between public, friends, restricted groups, etc, especially since they change how those work every other week. There's been too many times where that "see what your profile looks like" thing was wholly inaccurate.

I wonder if that's counting "inferred" accounts that are created when Facebook figures out that someone has a friend who is not on Facebook and needs a place to store their information?

Also, cue the chorus of people going "I would never use Facebook!"

According the the NBC article the number is 1 billion "active monthly users" so I don't think anything is "inferred". I can imagine that some of those billion might be people with multiple active accounts that they use for different purposes though. It's not such a stretch if they truly did have 800 million active users when they did the IPO and even given the conservative growth projections they gave back then the number seems right on track.

That depends. If one of your friends takes a picture of the group and posts it to Facebook and the facial recognition software then goes "that's the guy's friend who doesn't have a profile" and stamps your location using the metadata from the picture along with the list of who you are with, that might count as an active use. At the very least the profile is getting updated, even though it is not visible to the average user.

How many of these accounts are duplicates? For instance, are they counting my sister's dog among their 1 billion users? One of my employees maintains a facebook presence for their cat....does that count?

I wonder if that's counting "inferred" accounts that are created when Facebook figures out that someone has a friend who is not on Facebook and needs a place to store their information?

Also, cue the chorus of people going "I would never use Facebook!"

According the the NBC article the number is 1 billion "active monthly users" so I don't think anything is "inferred". I can imagine that some of those billion might be people with multiple active accounts that they use for different purposes though. It's not such a stretch if they truly did have 800 million active users when they did the IPO and even given the conservative growth projections they gave back then the number seems right on track.

That depends. If one of your friends takes a picture of the group and posts it to Facebook and the facial recognition software then goes "that's the guy's friend who doesn't have a profile" and stamps your location using the metadata from the picture along with the list of who you are with, that might count as an active use. At the very least the profile is getting updated, even though it is not visible to the average user.

That's not an "active user". Active user means people are logging in and doing something on the site. An algorithm that updates a page because someone puts a picture up of someone not actively using Facebook doesn't denote an "active user" it only denotes activity. If Facebook is counting every activity that happens anywhere on the site as user activity then, yes, it's probably a misleading number but given how open they've been with their user numbers before and the number of faked or spam accounts I don't think anyone has any reason to doubt that there really are a billion people around the world using the service (besides their inherent distrust of large companies that people freely give up loads of private information to). Given how many people bug me that I should sign up for Facebook on a weekly basis (because I'm apparently too productive if I'm not caring for virtual livestock or playing other "games") I can easily believe that number. If you want to be connected with your real friends and family online you'll go where they are and they're probably already on Facebook.

How many of these accounts are duplicates? For instance, are they counting my sister's dog among their 1 billion users? One of my employees maintains a facebook presence for their cat....does that count?

For a public speaking class I had to take in college a few years ago I created a faux-FB account and used it to as part of my report. By using that account (which was a portmanteau of my 2 cats' names), along with a file containing publicly scraped data from 187 million Facebook accounts (at the time over 30% of the FB population), and a listing of the names on the class roster, I was able to put together a rather interesting speech. Since all the data that I used was publicly accessible I was in no way breaking any laws. But the information I presented to the class - which included many of their own public Facebook account revelations - managed to scare the hell out of most of them. The purpose was ideally to show them how important it was to recognize the potential for abuse of this information, to show how public some of their information had become, and to give them incentive to learn the importance of privacy controls since it could all potentially be used against them in the future when applying for jobs.

To this day I have never deleted that fake account, which doesn't mean it still exists, but I wouldn't be surprised. Facebook is throwing these numbers around as a way to promote their capabilities to advertise to more people on a personal level. It makes sense for them to inflate these numbers in any way they can. It is really not hard to make fake accounts and use them for SPAM, social engineering, distribution of malware, etc.. so there is definitely incentive for the active creation and use of fake accounts.

To this day I have never deleted that fake account, which doesn't mean it still exists, but I wouldn't be surprised. Facebook is throwing these numbers around as a way to promote their capabilities to advertise to more people on a personal level. It makes sense for them to inflate these numbers in any way they can. It is really not hard to make fake accounts and use them for SPAM, social engineering, distribution of malware, etc.. so there is definitely incentive for the active creation and use of fake accounts.

How many times have you logged into that account in the last few days? You say you don't even know if it exists.

Facebook claims to only include active users, which presumably means ones that log in regularly. Pretty sure my very real facebook account is not included in the billion user count, since I hardly ever log in.

From my personal experience, Facebook (FB) is definitely managing the active account pool closely, with the goal of ensuring that each user logs in at least one time per month.

Since I do not use Facebook regularly, I regularly receive tickler e-mails encouraging to log in and "see what activity you have missed on Facebook. Your friend XXXXX has posted statuses, photos..." Once I log in, I get a break from FB e-mail for at least a week or so before the next barrage begins.

Based on how interested Facebook is in its active user count, and more specifically the 1B user mark, I would imaging that they would not willingly purge the quoted 8.7% fake accounts until they hit the 108.8% mark for 1B users, in order to retain their title as the first social network to reach this milestone.

How are they planning on storing all data from so many people in perpetuity (ala. "Timeline")? I'd be interested in seeing how much disk space is used by the average user (probably not that much if compressed--only a few GBs?) A million 2 TB drives for a billion users? I guess that's possible ...

Ok, Just to put this in perspective, the entire text of "War of Peace" comes to ~3.3MB. Also, Facebook resizes the images, there are no high-def pictures on FB at the moment (as far as I know, I barely use facebook...), but this photo is 1600x1200: Kitty! and comes to ~120KB. There is also all the metadata associated with members, which are mostly in the form of edges in a graph. Assuming that you need some data attached to those edges, A reasonable estimate of ~256 bytes per link (which is massive btw) and ~1000 links per member gets ~256KB of metadata.

In order to fill 1GB of space, you need 8393 photos or 196 million words of comments etc or 4 million (very bloated) links.

Those are exclusive, however the text one is interesting. Since 196 million words is the equivalent of posting a full-length tweet once every 4 seconds 24/7 for an entire year.

So you see, 1GB would be an enormous amount of data for a single user (especially given that 122KB per photo is on the large size, Facebook re-compress the images).

But even at 1GB per user, you only need 1 Exabyte of storage (only! Ha!), which sounds insane, but if each storage server has 40TB of space, that is only 25,000 storage servers, and with, say, 5 to a rack, thats 5000 racks. I mean, it's a lot, don't get me wrong, but 5,000 racks, spread over the entire planet isn't a big deal.

Finally, assumptions:There are an average of 6 bytes in a word. This works because the common accepted number of letters in a word is 5, so I added one to account for a space. I also assume UTF-8 encoding and a few other things. My link estimate is based on 128bit (16 byte) object ids and some extra data attached to the links. I doubt that it would be that much in reality. The photos are probably way off. I just grabbed a decently large image off of the internet and looked at the size. However Facebook do heavily (and lossily) compress images, so I think that I'm actually overestimating.

I have a 'fake' account just to get around Spotify's free account restrictions. You can stream an unlimited amount of songs for 6 months. After that, you get 10 hours of streaming a month. It was real easy to sign up for a 'fake' account, so I have another six months of unlimited streaming, after which I will need to figure out if I can start another 'fake' account.

In the real world, only one of my friends does not have a FaceBook account. It is definitely a very prevalent site among the under 30s, who only access it from their phone. It will be to FB's advantage to start getting older people to use it as they are more likely to use a PC or tablet and also more likely to visit ads.

Ok, Just to put this in perspective, the entire text of "War of Peace" comes to ~3.3MB. Also, Facebook resizes the images, there are no high-def pictures on FB at the moment (as far as I know, I barely use facebook...), but this photo is 1600x1200: Kitty! and comes to ~120KB. There is also all the metadata associated with members, which are mostly in the form of edges in a graph. Assuming that you need some data attached to those edges, A reasonable estimate of ~256 bytes per link (which is massive btw) and ~1000 links per member gets ~256KB of metadata.

In order to fill 1GB of space, you need 8393 photos or 196 million words of comments etc or 4 million (very bloated) links.

Those are exclusive, however the text one is interesting. Since 196 million words is the equivalent of posting a full-length tweet once every 4 seconds 24/7 for an entire year.

So you see, 1GB would be an enormous amount of data for a single user (especially given that 122KB per photo is on the large size, Facebook re-compress the images).

But even at 1GB per user, you only need 1 Exabyte of storage (only! Ha!), which sounds insane, but if each storage server has 40TB of space, that is only 25,000 storage servers, and with, say, 5 to a rack, thats 5000 racks. I mean, it's a lot, don't get me wrong, but 5,000 racks, spread over the entire planet isn't a big deal.

Finally, assumptions:There are an average of 6 bytes in a word. This works because the common accepted number of letters in a word is 5, so I added one to account for a space. I also assume UTF-8 encoding and a few other things. My link estimate is based on 128bit (16 byte) object ids and some extra data attached to the links. I doubt that it would be that much in reality. The photos are probably way off. I just grabbed a decently large image off of the internet and looked at the size. However Facebook do heavily (and lossily) compress images, so I think that I'm actually overestimating.

Yeah, later on I figured I was way too high with my estimate, though I was sort of implicitly assuming a "lifetime" of data and Facebook eventually allowing higher-resolution images/video. Thanks for the clarification--it does seem within the realm of possibility.

I have three: personal account, account I created for my company, and one by (cross-cutting) topic which may take off pretty damn soon (which might be nice or hell). On another question someone had, I do know of two inferred accounts created by FB (relatives) where the person ain't coming there, ever. Anecdotal, however indicative that I shouldn't exactly put much stock in that 1 billion number. I know of dupes, multiples for same individual, etc. for almost any site out there that I've been involved with and no, I am not talking about just me. Real, as opposed to registered usernames/accounts has been a fuzzy accounting topic for as long as their has been an internet. And I do mean Internet, not just the web. (I was nearby at the birth.)

I don't know... Maybe. But it seems rather odd that the stock is plummeting like a falling comet and lately Face Book seems desperate to try to prove that they are profitable.

Maybe some investors want to stem the bleed out long enough so when they can sell completely out they don't lose their shirt?

Something you do have to remember is that for every investor selling, there has to be someone out there to buy and there aren't enough suckers to buy all of it. So, someone has to believe that somehow, someday, it might actually worth more. And they just might be right.